Kevin Costner gets the Taken treatment for 3 Days to Kill, only to come out the other side with a much better movie. Like Taken, its about an emasculated, ex-CIA assassin (Costner) looking to reconnect with his estranged wife and daughter (Connie Nielsen, Hailee Steinfeld) while in the course of killing undesirables*. However, where Taken lovingly portrayed Liam Neeson as a righteous tool of vengeance, dispatching bad guys with hardly a sweat, 3 Days to Kill stresses Kevin Costners vulnerabilities the way John McTiernans Die Hard did with Bruce Willis. Suffering from terminal cancer, Costners Ethan Renner attempts to make peace with his family before he goes, a mission complicated by a vamped-up CIA heavy (Amber Heard) asking him to finish one more job, dangling a super-drug which could cure him in one hand and enough money to keep his family comfortable (should he die anyway) in the other. While low level thugs and henchmen arent much problem, age, disease, and the side effects of the drug take their toll, causing Renner to frequently collapse and experience warped vision if he exerts himself too much. Furthermore, he cant simply brutalize his way back into his familys graces (the way Neeson does in the Taken movies)--it was this double life which drove them off in the first place. Instead, he has to empathize, having the father-daughter moments he missed the first time around. This itself leads to the movies unexpected, brilliant humor when Renner bonds with two lackeys hes kidnapped over family issues. The highlight is the casual conversation he has when he kidnaps a lackey for the second time, a very Ralph Wolf & Sam Sheepdog approach to action tropes. Appropriate, as this movie is a wonderful cartoon--funny and insightful, if a little heavy-handed with sentiment-- leaving Taken to grumble in a corner somewhere about women not listening to it. *Both movies were produced/co-written by French action director Luc Besson, whose career has drifted towards factory farming these sorts of flicks.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Feb 2014 01:56:44 +0000
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